


The Static Problem

by orphan_account



Category: AFI
Genre: Davey is a cuddler, First Time, Fluff, Frat House era, M/M, psychology nerdiness, socially awkward Jade
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-25
Updated: 2013-01-25
Packaged: 2017-11-26 21:50:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/654774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Davey's battle with static electricity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Static Problem

**Author's Note:**

> I write about static a lot, but in the abstract, rather than the literal. This, however, it literal static. This story was written to immortalize a friend's very needy cat. Davey is really weird in it, but in a way I imagine he would be in real life. Oh, and because I just KNOW some history student is going to get on my ass about the Mesmer thing, know that Davey’s misconceptions of his magnetic theories are because he’s stupid, not me. This never happened, and I don't own them.

It was five fifteen in the morning when Davey arrived at the conclusion that there was something seriously wrong. More specifically, something seriously wrong with his _bed_ and _himself_ and the electrical currents these two deposits of matter were currently generating. 

Like all things arrived at at five fifteen in the morning after over 24 hours devoid of sleep, Davey’s conclusion lacked logic. 

Still, it was with utmost confidence that Davey regarded this situation. He was certain there was something electrically _askew_ , because a fraction of the reason Davey was lying awake at five fifteen in the morning instead of sleeping or at least hovering in that weightless, slide-show projection between-space of sleeping and _not quite_ was because of the electricity. Static electricity, that is. 

For some reason, every exhausted shift Davey made in his bed was accompanied by an alarming crackle of static electricity, some so impressive they sparked white and sinister between his sheets, exploding down the length of his polar-fleece PJ pants like miniature fireworks, or those packets of mysterious grainy shit they give you on the 4th of July to throw at the pavement with a resounding crack. Poppers. Is that what those were called? Davey couldn’t remember, but he decided it was fine, because the 4th of July was a dreadful holiday, anyway. Almost as dreadful as polar-fleece, which was a somehow really embarrassing material to wear and reminded Davey of little kids and field trips and the 7th grade. His excuse was that said pajama pants were a fan gift, black with a Jack Skellington pattern. Davey tried to wear fan gifts; he felt guilty and wasteful somehow if he didn’t. But still, polar-fleece. It was dreadful, and practically begged for static cling.

 

Davey rolled over again with a fitful sigh, the force of it making his hair lift and whir with static cling. He decided that when his internal monologue started containing multiple usages the word “dreadful,” it was time to stop rolling around in bed trying to sleep, and instead start rolling _out_ of bed to find something productive to do. He fumbled with the light on his bedside table, face crumpling in agony when the room was suddenly flooded and bright. “Ugh,” he grumbled, poking at the inside of his cheek with his tongue, sliding out of his stupid, electrically charged sheets and shocking himself in the process, padding blindly out of the room on sockless feet. 

There was one place to go when Davey couldn’t sleep: Jade’s room. Even if Jade was sleeping like a normal person (expected prognosis), Davey knew he wouldn’t mind if he slid in bed with him, even if he was carrying around ten tons of static electricity with him and would probably shock them both to death jelly-fish style. It wasn’t as if Jade was _cuddly_ , he just seemed to mind less than everyone else if Davey was being a clingy baby. Which he often was. 

Stumbling down the hall and hiding tender eyes behind bunched lids and too much coarse black hair, Davey finally made it to Jade’s room. He pushed the door in with his knee and squinted at the sliver of light he cast on Jade. Jade’s diminutive-looking body was nothing but a violin bow in black sheets, thin but strong. Davey nudged at Jade’s back, interrupting the steady rise and fall of his breathing rib cage. “Roll over, I can’t sleep,” he rasped. 

And after Jade glared over his shoulder with a confused face, mumbled a lot, and hefted himself to the edge of the mattress, Davey slid in beside him, making a contented noise. “Thanks” he added, letting his chin graze the boomerang shape of Jade’s shoulder blade in the dark. He noticed that he didn’t shock him, that there was no static electricity causing any unnecessary magnetized sensation between there bodies. A shame, really, because Jade was blissfully warm, the perfect thing for Davey to be electrically adhered to. 

“It must have been my bed...” he mused, lulled to a significantly-more-than-half sleep by Jade’s lazy breathing and the sudden absence of static. 

“Whaa?” Jade whispered. “Your bed?”

“It was all electrified, my pants kept on sparking. It reminds me of that French scientist you told me about... Mesmer? The one who conducted early hypnosis and psychotherapy by moving those magnetized rods around his patients? Didn’t he coin the phrase animal magnetism?” Davey hissed in the dark, filter somewhat diminished with exhaustion. 

Jade was silent for a moment, and Davey thought he must have fallen asleep before he suddenly announced, voice offended and muffled by his own arm and the bunch of un-static sheets, “French?! Dude, Mesmer was German. _Fraaannnzzzz_ Mesmer have you ever heard of a French dude named Franz? And he was a physician, not a scientist.” 

Davey wrinkled his nose without opening his eyes, content with the way his hair wasn’t clinging to everything. “Sorry. Regardless, he was right.I was mesmerized. I was animal-magnetized to my bed, and my sheets, and the polar-fleece was sparking like fucking 4th of July poppers and it was so. Fucking. Annoying. So I came in here,” Davey explained, distantly irritated he was doing a shitty job of articulating exactly how annoying the bed static problem was. 

Jade sighed long and low, and Davey then heard him smile. (Which was puzzling, because smiling isn’t exactly auditory, but somehow it was tonight, like static crackling in sheets.) Jade sighed, and smiled, and said, “Dave, please stop talking and go to sleep?” 

“Right.” 

Mesmerized, Davey nodded off, relieved all it took was removing his own flesh from his own bed to get rid of the static problem. 

 

~*~

However, by the following week Davey had calculated by clever process of elimination that his bed was not actually the cause of the static problem. 

Jade was. 

Or, Jade _wasn’t._ Mysteriously, Jade’s presence _eliminated_ the static problem when nothing else did, forcing Davey to endure long stretches of time when everything he touched shocked him, and his clothes clung and snagged to his own body with an annoying Mesmer-magnetism. However, when Jade came back from the grocery store or the park or the laundromat or wherever, the static went away. 

Davey realized to what extent this was all about Jade because when conveniently decided to take a weekend trip up to Ukiah to witness the birth of his cousin’s baby. Being a vehement anti-baby type of person, and not a very big fan of Jade’s cousin, either, Davey tried to dissuade the trip, but Jade insisted that it would give him some time to work, peace and quiet away from the frat house and its forever transient, music blasting, beer-chugging occupants. 

Because Davey didn’t know at this point that Jade’s departure would announce the static problem’s arrival, he agreed. After all, it wasn’t really a fair argument to bitch to Jade how much he’d miss him and his static-free bed and elegant shoulder blade, or how lonely he got without another drug-free person around to drink soda and watch movies with on Saturday nights. 

So on Thursday night, Jade drove north, and Davey became a mess of static electricity once again. It was especially irritating because Davey was in an affection starved mood, but everyone he touched he incidentally shocked. He spent the first few hours away from Jade lying in his own bed pouting with a stack of comic books and some flax seed granola in a bowl, begging every guy who walked by his room (with the strategically ajar door) to come spoon with him.

Responses were as follows:

Four of the victims, including Mark Unseen and this tall but young kid named Ryan, gave him shifty eyes and laughed, assuming he was joking. (Which he was not.) 

Smith said, “Isn’t that’s what my brother is for?” with an eyebrow peaked in irritation before he hurried off. 

Hunter gave a firm, nonnegotiable “No,” without even looking over his shoulder as he passed. 

Fortunately for Davey and Davey’s oncoming storm of existential crisis, Adam was the next guy to walk by, and Adam was both nice and a sucker. That was how Davey ended up luring Adam between his staticy sheets for a nice bromantic spooning session. 

Like he did during the times preceding this one, Adam complied grudgingly. “Dude, Dave, can’t we just slap each other’s backs like normal friends?” He whined, allowing Davey curl around his back, deceitfully narrow forearms flexing across his chest. 

“Would it make you feel better to be the big spoon?” Davey asked. 

“No, somehow this is more dignified,” he grumbled, shaking his head. “You’re so weird.” 

“Meh,” Davey agreed, snuffling in the back of Adam’s San Francisco Giants shirt. It smelled like sweat and cigarettes and fried eggs, and Davey rolled his eyes. Not at Adam’s sports loving, decidedly not straightedge and not vegan shirt, but at himself for missing Jade’s sharp, clean detergent and hair-gel scent, the spicy musk of his deodorant. It was entirely lame it missed not just Jade, but Jade’s _smell_ after three whole hours.

Davey shifted his leg and Adam cringed, tensing under Davey’s tattooed bicep. “Ouch,” he complained, reaching into the blankets and rubbing at his knee like a mosquito had bitten him. “You shocked me, you douche.” 

“Oh yeah...sorry about that. Me and my bed have this static problem,” Davey sighed, noticing his how shoulder length, wavy black hair was currently standing up on its own accord, fanned out and defying gravity as it clung to Adam’s back like the wire bones of a broken fan. “Because of animal magnetism.” 

“Gross, man. You can’t say ‘animal magnetism’ when you’re in bed with me.” 

“Sorry,” Davey said again, rubbing his face against the hard planes of muscle in Adam’s back, dissatisfied with his unfamiliar solidity, so unlike Jade who was bony and soft at the same time, giving way in places and holding fast in others. “I didn’t come up with it, this German Physician did...Franz Mesmer. He had this theory that all objects and people had a magnetic and electric relationship balanced between them, and mental illness was a result of some kind of imbalance between the magnetic relationship,” He explained very carefully. 

“Are you trying to tell me you’re mentally ill...?” Adam said after awhile. 

Davey tried to bite his back but did not succeed, seeing as there was nothing but obnoxious, firm smoothness to Adam’s back. 

“Ow,” Adam said anyway, kicking Davey’s shin. “Do you want to spoon, or are you just gonna shock and bite me the whole time?” 

“I was just _trying_ to explain that there’s some kind of imbalance between my bed and its electro-magnetic field.” 

“According to this German dude? Huh. I think you just wear too much polar-fleece.” 

Adam rolled out of the bed in question before Davey could shock, bite, kick, or otherwise injure him, cackling and promising he’d consider coming back when Davey was de-magnetized, or ready to play nice. 

~*~

It wasn’t until the following Day that Davey deducted that it was not the _bed_ whose electro-magnetic field was off, but his own. He concluded this because the static didn’t stay in the bed. When he finally dragged his ass out of bed to go to the gym, he shocked himself on the treadmill, and the lateral press, and the stationary bike. In fact, when Davey was laying on his back to bench, his hair managed to cling to the iron his was pumping through the duration of his work out, looking not unlike a gigantic black spider or perhaps an octopus that was trying to decide between alighting upon the free weight, or his head. To really solidify his suspicions, he poked Adam on the shoulder when they were leaving just to see if he shocked him, and judging by the way Adam snapped that until Mesmer fixed his electro-balances or whatever, he was forbidden from touching him, that worked, too. 

Davey didn’t wear polar fleece to the gym, but maybe the fact he kept his polar-fleece fan-gifts in the same drawer as his gym clothes caused a transfer of static electricity. He was beginning to believe this theory until he showered _after_ the gym and shocked himself on his razor, the shower curtain rod, and mysteriously, the soap. Of course, he wasn’t wearing clothes in the shower, polar-fleece or otherwise. 

The next logical conclusion was that Davey, himself, had a static problem. 

A static problem that had peculiarly evaporated upon getting in Jade’s bed. Before Davey got dressed, he made sure to pay Jade’s bed a visit, mostly dried off but still partially dripping as he slid between the messy sheets. Fore purely empirical research, of course, but he still felt weird lying there in Jade’s bed without Jade, nude save for a once-green towel now spotted in a snottish yellow from bleach spots, draped half-assedly across his junk. 

He texted Jade then, asking _can i sleep in your bed tonight while you’re gone? mine’s still mesmerized_

Jade replied with _i let you sleep in my bed while i’m in it. why wouldn’t i let you while i’m gone?_

Davey didn’t have a good response to that, so instead he changed the subject and they texted about Mesmer, about the weather and recently born babies all crumpled and ugly with newness, about allergies and the way things were apparently blooming in Ukiah. But still, even as Davey’s thumbs typed clumsy messages to Jade while he laid in Jade’s bed, the static remained, and the sheets clung to his legs and his hair fanned out and every other second, he was shocked. 

~*~

Jade came back a day early, much to Davey’s (figurative) shock. Davey had been moping around the frat, bundled in a zebra print polar-fleece fan-gift blanket, his hair an utter vision of chaos. He had grown so staticy over the course of the weekend his house mates had banished him to his room, fearing the jolting electric sting that accompanied every time he touched them. His presence contaminated the couch and its shredded upholstery, the beer-stained bean bag chair, and even the carpet. 

It made contact with any of the furniture a rather unpleasant experience, so Davey and his imbalance electro-magnetic relationship with everything had become kind of unwelcome until Jade returned and hopefully neutralized the situation. Davey had been lamenting his lonely state in the kitchen with a bowl of rice crispies and a jar of peanut butter when Jade himself appeared in the doorway, looking haggard around the eyes and bent under the weight of a suitcase. Davey froze, and they looked at each other for a long while, an quiet, spreading relief unfolding between them like a slow-blooming flower. Each looked like he could not _wait_ to see the other one, and Davey was caught off guard by his nervous his stomach was. 

“You’re early,” Davey mumbled, managing to sound flippant in spite of the thick weight that had settled in the air between them. Davey’s blanket crackled, and Jade sneezed. 

“Yeah, I couldn’t get any work done,” Jade sighed, setting his suitcase down on the floor of the kitchen with a groan, pouring himself a glass of water and regarding Davey and his state of distinct home-body grossness over the rim of the cup. 

“Why not?” 

Jade swallowed, a drawn own swallow with his eyes closed. Then opened them and said, “you were distracting me.” 

Baffled, Davey involuntarily clutched his phone, hand flying to the familiar shape of it in his sweats pocket. “I didn’t text you _that_ much.” 

“No...It wasn’t your texts, it was your existence,” Jade sighed, downing the rest of his water and setting the glass down carefully, hand resting on the counter long after it was empty. His eyes were wide and watery, and he blinked, sneezing again. “Allergies. It’s these mother fucking allergies...they get really bad when I’m away from you.” 

It was then that he looked up at Davey, his mouth a thin line of defiance, like he was challenging himself to continue saying impossible things. “I think I’m allergic to being away from you.” 

Davey stared, and stared. And then he realized that nature, or Mesmer, or _someone_ was trying to tell them something. 

“Well then,” Davey said quietly, shucking his polar fleece because of the sudden heat that was springing from his body in nauseas waves. “Maybe you shouldn’t, then. Be away from me I mean.” 

Jade stepped closer to where Davey was sitting, and Davey stood up, alarmed, needing to be only the normal few inches shorter than Jade, not a whole head. He watched Jade’s hand rise in slow motion and come to rest at the back of his head to smooth a whorl of frizzed, static, mussed up hair. Davey was about to warm him that he might get shocked, but much to his quiet awe, nothing happened. No spark of light, no crackle, no 4th of July. Just the profoundly _right_ feeling of Jade’s hand resting tentatively at the back of his head, and a slow-moving dizziness swimming behind his vision. 

_oh._

Davey closed his eyes. 

Jade kissed him. 

Right there in the kitchen, Jade was kissing Davey and no one was getting shocked. It was quite miraculous, Davey thought, as he let Jade suck his tongue into his mouth, his hand moving blindly across his lower back. Much better than the 4th of July. 

Davey pressed himself into Jade’s body, starved for contact and the comforting way that Jade was bony in places and soft in others, the way he was taller but smaller so Davey had to tilt his head up minimally, but could hold him down everywhere else. His stomach lurched independently from his body, palms sweating and throat making a choked sound as Jade’s teeth held onto his lower lip, keeping him in close. 

The entire time them kissed, Davey’s hair and clothes stayed in one place, manipulated only by Jade’s hands, not some unbalanced electro-magnetic force. When they finally broke for air, Jade said what Davey was thinking. 

“Much better,” he said contentedly, holding Davey close to his body. 

Davey nodded. “Your allergies?” 

“Yeah. And just...everything.” 

They were breathing fast, both surprised that _this_ was what it meant, but also thinking _of course_. 

Davey nodded, head on Jade’s shoulder and hand fitted around the boomerang shape it created in his back, sharp and familiar and bird-like. His bed was probably safe now, he thought, upon realizing the static problem has less to do with _it_ , and more to do with who was _in it_ or not. Before he suggested that they migrate from the kitchen to said bed, he blinked, staring half-lidded at the curve of Jade’s collarbone, mesmerized.


End file.
